Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) serve as persistent identifiers, or stable, trusted references for information objects. Among other things, they aim to be web addresses (URLs) that don’t return 404 Page Not Found errors. The ARK Alliance is an open global community supporting the ARK infrastructure on behalf of research and scholarship. End users, especially researchers, rely on ARKs for long term access to the global scientific and cultural record. Since 2001 some 8.2 billion ARKs have been created by over 750 organizations — libraries, data centers, archives, museums, publishers, government agencies, and vendors. ARKs are open, mainstream, non-paywalled, decentralized persistent identifiers that researchers can begin to work with in a short time. They identify anything digital, physical, or abstract.
centrally registered identifier data retrieval